It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

I thought ‚Heller‘ was a very bad decision.

I’m over being a pop star. I don’t wanna be a hot girl. I wanna be iconic. And I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. I feel like I’m highly respected, which is more important than any award or any amount of records. And I feel like there comes a point when being a pop star is not enough.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

I always say the strength of democracy lies in criticism. If there is no criticism, that means there is no democracy. And if you want to grow, you must invite criticism. And I want to grow; I want to invite criticism.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

My fat never made me less money.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.

Why am I a star? It can’t be because of looks.

I can encourage my daughter to love her body, but what really matters are the observations she makes about my relationship with my own body.

At the end of the day, your fans are the people who support you in and out. And their opinions matter.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

One of the most terrible feelings in the world is knowing that someone else doesn’t like you. Especially when you don’t know what you’ve done to deserve it.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

If anything, we should feel sorry for the people who want us to feel bad about ourselves, because they are the ones struggling for approval. In middle school, bullies tortured other kids because they thought it would make people like them more.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

I think it’s OK to be confident in yourself.

I am not a fan of books.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

We are Divine enough to ask and we are important enough to receive.

The artist in me cries out for design.

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Material things ain’t nothing. You feel me? At the end of the day, it’s who you is. You wasn’t born with it; you gon‘ die without it.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.